The ambiguous victim: Miklós Nyiszli's narrative of medical experimentation in Auschwitz-Birkenau
(EN)
Turda, Marius
While recent scholarship has – for the past two decades – endeavoured to transcend initial reservations about memoirs of Holocaust survivors, the difficulty with some of these memoirs – namely their authors’ implicit complicity in unethical medical research and in the Nazi Holocaust in general – remains however problematic. To address this thorny issue, this article considers the memoirs of a Jewish inmate doctor, Miklós Nyiszli, who worked with and for SS medical officers in Auschwitz, and his Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. His memoirs can help us understand wider truths about the “bond of complicity” that, according to Primo Levi, existed between perpetrators and victims in the Nazi concentration camp.
(EN)
